Black Chocolate
by Daydreaming of
Summary: A collection of bitter, sweet, and bittersweet SnK romance one-shots and drabbles. May range from perversely sadistic tragedies to the cheesiest of fluffs in this side of the Pacific. Pairings so far are LeviPetra and ErenMika. Enjoy!
1. Meet

**Black Chocolate**

_Black Chocolate, a collection of bitter, sweet, and bittersweet SnK romance one-shots and drabbles. May range from perversely sadistic tragedies to the cheesiest of fluffs in this side of the Pacific. Enjoy (or not)._

Author's Note: I do not own Shingeki no Kyojin or any of it's respective characters and am in no ways affiliated with it's creator, Isayama Hajime-sensei, bless him. These stories are written for entertainment (or not) purposes only and I am in no way profiting from them in any financial terms whatsoever.

**Meet**

You run one final swipe of the now crimson handkerchief against the dull edge of your blade and raise it above your head into the moonlight. It reflects white against your eyes and you are forced to blink in pain. You place it back into its sheath and spend the next ten minutes washing your handkerchief in sewage water. You are tempted to use your drinking water but you have no idea when you will have some again. You are wise beyond your years due to the pain you have had to deal with at so young an age so you wrinkle your nose against the stench as you squeeze and wring. A close inspection: it has turned into a muddy white now, but at least it isn't red.

You fold it and pocket it. You will hang it to dry properly when the sun comes out.

You escape the moonlight and walk silently towards the row of tall houses. You blend in the shadows and feel a lot more comfortable. It is an hour past your bedtime but you still aren't sleepy. Today's events keep running through your head again and again and you feel a little nauseous when you remember why your blade got splashed with red in the first place.

Your eyes are trained in the darkness and you come to a halt at a strange sight. There is a girl in the darkness, perhaps fifteen years older than you, and she has red hair. That is the first thing you notice. The second thing you notice is the wings on the back of her green cloak and you feel like you have seen them in one of your dreams before although you can't remember which exactly.

She looks strange because such beauty doesn't belong here, in these narrow, stinking alleyways you call home. She doesn't belong here because it is nearing midnight, and women should never be out once the sun falls.

You are ten meters away from here but your trained ears hear her voice. "Where am I?" she mutters, perplexed. "Where are the others? What am I doing here?" She feels her nape and neck, a little warily, and runs a hand up and down her spine. "Am I… dead?"

You think she is crazy and move to turn away but pause. You squint. You realize with strangled horror that she _is _and she _isn't_. There but not entirely, like a ghost, like the words _beauty_ and _hope_ and _peace_ and _love_.

You hate those things. They let you down and gave you nothing but pain. You decide that you hate this girl too. You hold a breath and start to tiptoe forward. Bigger men would come to hurt her soon anyway, and saving her from the trouble would be doing her a favor…

"Who's there? I'm armed!"

You pause in your tracks and squeeze yourself flat against a wall. You admire her for scoping you out quickly, considering she isn't from around here. You see fierceness cloud her amber eyes but the hostility is mixed with worry and fear, like the chickens you are capable of stealing and killing, like that man who tried to strangle you earlier today when he realized his mistake too late.

She is in a dead end and once you step in front of her, there would be no space for her to escape. It is nearing midnight and no one would be around to see her soundlessly drop to the ground…

"Heichou? Is that you?"

You freeze; your heart constricts in fear. If you turn around to look at who she was talking to, you won't be able to defend yourself from her. If you try attacking her now, the man behind you would kill you. You are trapped.

The best you could do is to hide in the velvet smooth darkness and wait for them pass by. So you do. While you wait, you stare at her wide amber eyes and you wonder how golden they would look in the sunlight. They stare back at yours and you could see comprehension dawn in them.

You transform your legs into a spring and tighten your grip on your knife. Any second now, she would regret ever coming to this place.

"Hei- Levi!"

You gasp audibly and your eyes widen on their own. You do not have any friends or family and no one knows your name. You have never met this stranger before, and yet she just said your name out loud.

You tense ten times more as she drops to her knees and pulls you close to her. She had run towards you as you stood gaping at her and you are ashamed to know you could have killed her then but didn't out of shock. You decide to end this now, and the tip of your knife is against her nape. But you feel her start to tremble: she is crying against you, her tears hot on your shoulder and one of her hands gently pushes your head towards her shoulder, the other firmly but not uncomfortably pressed against your back.

A curious sensation mildly storms around your navel before climbing up to your wildly beating heart and staying there. You realize that no one, save perhaps when you were a baby and couldn't remember, has ever touched you without malice or any plans to hurt you for the first time in seven years…

She repeats your name again and again and does the unthinkable. She sits down, her feet tucked beneath her lap, and _lifts _you – you are so surprised that you drop your knife – and she settles you down on her lap before wrapping her arms around you again. You have enough strength to strangle her but the sweet scent of her hair drowns you and you don't. You do not understand why she is crying. Your chest feels strange as if it's been covered by a thick warm blanket on a winter's eve. Your fist, tightly clenching her shoulders, begin to relax and because you have no place to rest them, you let them stay there. Again, you feel as if you have seen this somewhere before, in a long forgotten dream and the longer you sit, the warmer you become and your heart feels lighter and your shoulders slump.

"Who are you?" you whisper as softly as you could. You are afraid she might leave if you tried anything drastic. "Are you what children call their mother?"

To your surprise she chuckles – no one shows this much emotion in the Underground City – and she gently pushes you away from her that you could see her face, all glazed in tears. "It doesn't matter," she said smiling and settling her hands on your face, rubbing her thumbs against your cheeks. "What matters is that you remember what I tell you, you understand?"

You nod your head as she wipes away her tears with a knuckle. You ponder over if you should consider lending her your handkerchief. She lifts you again, – this time you do not bother to resist –sets you on your feet, and she kneels in front of you. She must be a very short lady because you tower over her, even if only by an inch. She places her hands on your shoulder and looks at you straight in the eye.

"Levi, I want you to say this and believe in it, okay? 'I am loved no matter what.' Do you think you could say that for me?"

This lady is very strange. "I am loved no matter what," you say. You do not believe it but you wonder why you ever thought of hating this woman.

She nods her head at you. "I want you to say that to yourself before you go to bed each night, okay? Especially after bad, sad days, do you understand?"

"But why should I do that?" you ask. Her smile shrinks by a fraction, and tears begin to hover at the tips of her eyes.

"Because this world is cruel place and life is almost never easy Levi… but I don't want you to worry about that just yet." She smiles again and instead of wiping her eyes, wipes yours as if you have been the one crying. "It's okay to fall down and fail sometimes, do you understand? It's okay to make mistakes, and make the wrong choices, and cry…"

"No it's not," you say slightly irritated. How naïve she is to think like this! You take it upon yourself to explain. "Failing is not an option. The smallest sign of weakness could kill you out here"

"That's not always true," she smiles and rumples your hair. "You will be my weakness in the future and it's because of you that I will remain strong until the end."

You feel your face contort itself in your confusion. "What do you mean?"

The clock from somewhere up above you begin to chime. Is it just you, or is she getting paler? "I do not matter, Levi. Just… just always remember. No matter how hard things get, no matter how cruel life seems, there will always be someone who loves you, understand? Even if you can't see them, or hear them, or touch them anymore, they will always, always be with you, do you understand me?"

She is starting to fade back to _not being_. Irrationally, you know that you will never see her again and panic grips your heart. You do not want her to leave, not yet, not ever. "Wait!" you cry but you couldn't even touch her anymore. "Don't leave me!"

"Remember, Levi," she smiles at you and she is so beautiful, she could be perfect, perfect if she could still touch you, perfect if her voice isn't starting to sound like the heartless whisper of the wind, perfect if she wouldn't leave. Still fading, quicker and quicker, she leans towards you and touches her lips to yours for a fraction of a second. You feel her, not physically, but her warmth is real and soft and wonderful. "I love you, Levi," she whispers and her eyes shine golden. You blink back the tears and stretch out your arms to cling to her but she is gone.

The rain starts to fall through where the piss and mire of the world above fall on your head when you happen to pass beneath them. Suddenly lost and lonelier than you have ever been in your life, you begin to cry…


	2. Home

Warning: Pointless-ish ErenMika Drabble. If you don't like the preformed sentence, kindly leave x this page and/or (hopefully and?) check out some of my other stories.

For Anime-Only-ers: On paragraph five, sentence three, the final specific scenario is yet to appear on Season 2 next year, but I didn't give details to keep you from being spoiled.

Author's Note: Sorry I've been away for so long; this past week had been the final seven-day cycle of academic induced stress for the school year and the weeks before that were dedicated solely to useless (did I say that out loud? *coughs*) review resulting in the absence of brain space for these kind of things. Long story short, summer has unofficially begun and I'll have more time to update this and "The Rising" (Chapter 55: Pain completely ruined my plans and now I have to rethink the whole thing!), and write and post new stuff before going on hiatus to finish a year-old Sandman fanfic before I turn sixteen.

I ship ErenMika so hard; Mikasa's unconditional love is just real and wonderful and I want nothing better than to slap Eren hard in the face and yell in his good ear that he should go choke on his Titan's toenails or something for being too stupid to notice / for ignoring (in which case, he should choke on his big, fat head) the love of such a beautiful, intelligent, talented, faithful young woman with abs (Mikasa's practically my role model in fitness; I'm nothing but skin and bones) who wants nothing more than to be able to love him in peace. It's nice to finally get to write about them even if I'm yet to find a way to miraculously un-one-sided-ify this pairing. Hope you like it!

Pahabol April 20, 2014:I left this out in the air for like a month and a half and when I returned to it and reread it, I found the ending… lame. So I changed it. I hope this is better than the first.

* * *

**Home**

Mikasa had always looked at Eren whenever she thought no one was looking. It was one of the unspoken rules that pervaded her life: there was something so magical about her savior's face, the ways his eyes burned with overwhelming determination, the gentle, pacifying power the sight of the upturned corners of his lips radiated. Sure, he wasn't perfect; saying he never did anything to hurt or displease her, on purpose or not, would be a lie. But he had been her oasis more times than she could possibly count and she knew that no matter how much she protected him, it would never be enough to repay how he illuminated and warmed her cold existence back to glorious, meaningful life.

And now, like so many times before, she was watching him sleep. Just the sound of the restive cadence of his breathing was music to her ears, something she never bothered trying to understand; the happiness it gave her was something she could never question or comprehend and she was fine with that. Making sure that he was deep in sleep, she scooted closer to her loved one's side, leaning in a little closer to observe the rise and fall of his chest better. As children, when they were as tall as each other, the shade of a tree would be more than enough to grace them both as she watched him rest, but now that they were grown, the shade of the "coconut" (they had all agreed, before their first non-Titan related mission beyond the Walls that the honor of naming all the beings they encountered Outside belonged to Armin, and the strange slender tree that was native only to warm, sandy places was no exception) that now covered Eren was inadequate and she pulled her scarf off her neck to cover his bare, sun-toasted feet which were, for once, not leaving hallmarks on the sand of the beach.

She heard in a tale her mother told her long ago, ages before the Titans or Walls, their people believed that the destinies of those who were made for one another were joined together with the red string of fate and that nothing, not even death, could sever its infinite ties. She remembered the way the strip of red cotton draped itself around his neck and how he had shyly flung it around hers before adjusting it properly when she had started crying on that fateful day and blushed. Even before her innocence was dashed, she hadn't been the kind to build castles in the air out of dreamstuff as the life she had had was more than enough for her, but everytime she felt the pulse on her neck throb life into her against the soft touch of cloth that still smelled faintly of her family, she would be reminded of the man her heartstrings were tethered to, and could not help but think of her mother's words and believe.

The song of the waves fell in tune with his breathing and she carefully tucked a brown lock of hair that had fallen over his face somewhere where they couldn't tickle or bother him into awakening. She wondered how she could have been afraid of him the first time she laid eyes on him, thankful for yet terrified of the dull scarlet that grotesquely colored his knife. The scarf he gave her later was of the same color but to her, it meant nothing but life and though it was no longer as bright, the light of the sun that had shone off his eyes the next day was even more beautiful than any she had ever seen before.

A crab scuttled through the sand at the corner of her eye and she remembered the sound of the wooden floor of their house creaking as he had tiptoed to her room in the dead of night over the following weeks to bashfully offer his shoulder to be the temporary grave of her tearstained face, whispering words of comfort to her ear in an attempt to calm her traumatized heart. His laughter, however, was a completely different thing, and it had shocked her out of her skin and stolen away her heart the first time she heard him squeal in excitement over Armin's proposal that stars were thousands of other brightly shining worlds suspended over the void of the night.

But he changed the day she lost her mother all over again, and for the first time, she whiffed the tang of his terror-bidden sweat, the blood off his scars, his bitter tears, and she had felt pained that he had to go through the torture that had very nearly broken her. She continued to watch him over the years as he warped into something tougher, stronger, colder but certainly never cruel, and because he never let his feet touch the ground laxly or laugh freely, she treasured every moment his body relaxed against hers after exhausting days of training when he could hardly keep his eyes open at dinner and the times she was able to watch him sleep in peace during their days off. She watched over him when the Garrison questioned his identity and affiliation, watched over him on their return from their first expedition, watched over him after his fight with Annie, watched over him after his first experiment with Hange, watched over him every other time he fell into a coma after that. She stayed by his side when he got sick, got hurt, got weak, got scared and all those times, fear had gripped at her heart over the prospect of losing him, physically or mentally, knowing that if that happened, she would no longer be able to go back home again.

The wind that tousled Eren's hair was gentle and violently torn away from her musings, she watched the restrained flight of his short, brown tresses, entranced, with hitched breath. And then, unable to help herself, she released it in a shaky little chuckle and felt warmth start to hover at the edges of her eyes as the heat in her heart increased a hundredfold. All those times when he had drifted in the fringe between life and death, humane consciousness and primitive unconsciousness, she had been there, scared that if he opened his eyes again, she would not be able to find him, scared that he never will. Now that the Titans were dead and the Walls had all fallen, there was nothing left for them to do but soak up the wonders of the new world and live or, in her case, watch the hero of humanity sleep in unadulterated peace.

Eren sighed softly and Mikasa watched in silent awe as his eyes fluttered open, slowly and calmly, unburdened and happy. He smiled as their eyes met, when he realized who it was. "Mikasa," he whispered, like a prayer.

She reddened even more and felt her eyes sting and liked it. A few seconds ago, she didn't believe she could possibly love Eren more; now, after hearing her say her name like that, she didn't believe that anything was impossible.

"We should head back now," she said, moving to free his feet from her scarf, turning away to hide her smile. It fell as quickly as it came however, and she carefully slipped her red band of comfort from beneath his soles in silence. She knew he had a different view of her love for him, knew it wasn't her his heart was pining for, knew how slim the chance there was of him ever seeing her as more than his faithful sister.

"Why?" he asked, like a little child. "I like it here. Won't you stay with me?"

She turned to look at him with undisguised surprise and a galloping heart. He thought he was defying her expectations again but the sleepy, innocent look in his eyes crushed her hopes. She gave him a sweet smile anyway. "You're really out of it. Have you been in so deep a sleep that you think you're still dreaming?"

He blinked confusedly at her and his eyebrows made a small furrow. "No. I've been having such a long dream…" he trailed off vaguely with the tiniest of smiles. She wrapped her scarf around her neck but made no move to stand. "This feels like six years ago," she said, unsure if nostalgia was biting at her soul or caressing it. "Do you remember your dream, Eren?"

"Yeah," he said vaguely, wiping a knuckle over his eyes but and sitting up. "I dreamt we owned a little bed-and-breakfast by the sea and everyone's come over for our yearly reunion. It's my turn to play Titan for the night and Siegriech slain me so hard, I knocked over the water jug all of us uncovered in Africa. And then Arthur, Isabel and Jacques charged over to eat me but little Sakura leapt in front of me right in time and saved me." He smiled wider and looked over at her lazily. "What a nice way to wake up, huh?"

Mikasa had started over the word "Sakura:" it was an uncommon name that had the same origin as hers but she had a feeling that Eren wasn't talking about her father's wife. "Who is… Sakura?" she asked tentatively, not at all eager to leave the coconut's shade.

Eren stared at her curiously. "You of all people should know," he said. "You insisted on naming her, remember? It's only fair," he hurried on as if they were just talking about the weather, wiping the last of sleep from his eyes. "I named our first child Seigreich, so our little girl should have whatever it was you wanted."

Mikasa breathed sharply and felt the cold desert her cheeks. "Wh-what?"

Eren rolled his eyes and huffed. "We're getting married, aren't we? I'm not about to let that horseface be my brother-in-law if I can help it." He dug his palm into the sand and tossed the first pebble he found out into sea. He wouldn't look her in the eye but there was color in his tanned cheeks. "You're my bestfriend, Mikasa. After Armin, of course. But I don't plan on staying with anybody else forever." He stood up and pulled on her right hand. "What are you waiting for?" he asked impatiently. "Let's go home already."

Mikasa wondered why his shining face was beginning to blur and it was only after a trail of warmth made its way down her cheeks did she realize she was crying.

She tried choking out her words of assent but only managed to sob harder. He sat back down next to her and undid her scarf, which she had flung rather carelessly around her neck. "Hush," he crooned, wrapping then adjusting the scarlet strip of cloth around her neck with utmost care. And then, he hugged her like he first did so many years ago and whispered, "It's alright. You're with me, now."

Glowing and quivering, she let her tears fall and did something she had always been longing to do: she leaned in and kissed him, full on the lips and she cried a little more when he kissed her back, entangling his fingers in her long, silky, black hair.

And when she pulled back, he was still gazing at her, like nothing else mattered to him but the stars in her eyes. "Let's go home, Mikasa," he said.

She enveloped her arms around him, keeping him as close to her as possible and placing an ear against his beating heart. He wrapped her up just the same and kissed her on the forehead. And she said, "I'm already home."

_fin_

* * *

Some Headcanon: Eren and Mikasa's first child is Siegreich, the German word for "victorious." This "triumphant hunter's" little sister's name is Sakura or "cherry blossom," the Japanese national flower, which is also the name of Mikasa's mother (headcanon).

Armin and Historia's kids are named Arthur and Crystal after the legendary King Arthur (I believe Armin's English and Historia's French), and the woman who taught Historia how to read and write and eventually helps her form her own identity (headcanon).

Levi gets married too (BECAUSE HE DESERVES ALL THE HAPPINESS IN THE WORLD) and has a little girl named Isabel (asdfghjkl my feels hurt) and a younger boy named Peter (asdf*ckinghjkl they hurt even more).

Jean marries a nice girl with long straight black hair like Mikasa and they have two sons, Jacques (called Jean-poi [did I get that right?] by Uncle Eren, Uncle Connie and Auntie Sasha) and Marco whom Sakura has a crush on ('cause I love flippin' tables).

Sasha and Connie have paternal twins, Sunny and Martin (*bawls*) who are so like their parents that everyone is creeped out ("What exactly do you feed your kids?" "Bread and potatoes, of course!" "I see… it does have a… certain effect on people, doesn't it?").

Siegreich, Arthur, Isabel and Jacques are age group mates as are Sakura and Marco and Crystal, Sunny and Martin. All the younger kids had already gone to bed during Eren's futuristic vison, save for Sakura, who loves her daddy to bits and won't go to sleep without him.


End file.
